Tag Archives: urban planning

If meditation can actually make minds and bodies healthier, could the same approach be taken with cities? What if, as a supplemental process to traditional quantitative analysis, planners and urban shapers meditated on their city? What does it mean to be that city? Would such a process reveal truths typically unseen? Continue reading →

I’ve heard Seaside, Florida, lauded as the first great project of the New Urbanism. I’ve also heard it ridiculed as new-faux urbanism. So what’s the truth, at least as I see it? Well, during the scant few hours I recently spent there I saw a lot to like. Dozens of wonderful pathways for bikes and pedestrians that connect everywhere to everywhere, many of which feel like something to discover instead of simply travel. Residential roads eschewing sidewalks in favor of shared space. Relatively tall buildings on relatively narrow lots. Architecture with integrity. Loads of trees and shady places (critical given the town’s latitude). Seaside feels like it was designed by people who care.Continue reading →

First off, thank you to the thousands of readers who continued to visit the Planologie Blog despite nary a new post in over a month. I expected my modest readership to dry up completely, and am quite pleased to be proven wrong.

Secondly, I’m changing things up a bit. Sea changes in my life have sent me on a bit of a walkabout, with my next couple of years to be spent studying Urban Studies in Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen, and Madrid, among other European locales. First, though, I’m in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Boston for a month apiece. I’m going to spend less time researching articles to repost, more time exploring, observing, and documenting my travels. Posts will no longer be daily; two or three per week is my new target, and it might take a bit before I’m back to even that. The viewpoint will remain, of course, focused on urban planning-related issues.

Again, thank you everyone for sticking with me. Hopefully the best is yet to come.Continue reading →

Poet John Keats defined negative capability as the ability to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” If this doesn’t sound especially profound or relevant to planologie, well, it is both. In yesterday’s post, Santi Tafarella linked negative capability with empathy, with attentive listening, and with the ability to sublimate one’s existential angst into larger mysteries of being. All admirable qualities. But what might it mean for an urban planner to practice negative capability? Or for the general populous? Or the city itself?Continue reading →

The grid plan dates from antiquity; some of the earliest planned cities were built using grids. This article describes the first historical appearances of grid plans in various parts of the world.Continue reading →